Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Someone

As a hacker, I want those, too, but I’m not 100% sure I want that as a developer or user. It also has disadvantages.

Part of what Apple sell app developers is that piracy is hard on the App Store.

It also benefits developers and users that tweaking apps to cheat in games is as good as impossible.

A cloned or patched iOS that allowed users to install anything could change that by no longer checking app signatures.

View on HN

> It also benefits developers and users that tweaking apps to cheat in games is as good as impossible.

This would be just as impossible in a well-designed version of iOS that allowed arbitrary app installation - iOS could do client-side attestation, and app developers could choose to prevent users from playing online matches with app versions that aren't attested by Apple (or a hypothetical Steam for iOS, for instance).

And yet, desktop anti-cheat is a continual cat and mouse game more than any iOS anti-cheat conflict I've seen. One can argue that macOS, Linux and Windows are not sufficiently "well-designed" OSes for this purpose, but at that point you'd have to start distinguishing what features are missing from those OSes that would be present in this hypothetical iOS version that isn't highly dependent on the degree to which Apple tightly controls the ability to install software on your device.

Anyone remotely familiar with operating system design can tell you that desktop and mobile operating systems have massive differences with respect to security. "macOS, Linux and Windows are not sufficiently "well-designed" OSes for this purpose" is exactly the case.

Ok, so what are the features missing from those OSes that iOS has that enable these anti-cheat capabilities and also that are also not dependent on Apple maintaining its strict control over what can and can't run on iOS?

A complete trusted boot chain, lack of third-party kernel modules, and remote attestation. Nothing runs in iOS kernel space without Apple saying so (which is NOT the case for desktop operating systems), which is a prerequisite for remote attestation (which iOS also supports).

None of these properties are compromised by allowing arbitrary user-space code, which is what is one of the parents thought would happen.

TBH as an app developer myself I'd far prefer an option to publish and make transactions outside of Apple's purview than any kind of concern about piracy or meddling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com